[_To ALICE LONGWORTH_]
There is a special quality about a December sunset. The ruffles of red
gold gradually untightening, the congested mauve islands on a
transparent sea of green, the ultimate luminous primrose dissolving into
violet powder and then the cold biting night lit up by strange patches
of colour that have somehow been forgotten in the sky.
Eve was walking home, her quick, defiant movements challenging the
evening, her head bent slightly forward, her chin almost touching her
muff, while her eyes shone and her cheeks glowed and her lithe figure
seemed almost to be cutting through the icy air.
"This is happiness," she thought exultantly, "this bitter winter
stimulus--I feel so light--as if my heart and mind were empty--only my
body is quivering with life--the pure life of physical fitness. Why
think, or feel, or look forward?" She doubled her pace until her feet
seemed to be skimming the road. "I feel like a duck and drake," she
laughed to herself. "Nothing matters, nothing, while there is still
frost in the world."
And then she saw a little motor waiting on the other side of the road.
She stopped dead and her heart stopped with her.
"There is no reason why it should be his. Hundreds of people have motors
like that."
Resolutely she took a step forward. "I can't see from here, and I won't
go and look," she added as she crossed over.
And then, shutting her eyes:
"Jerry," she said to herself, trying to kill his ghost with his name.
The evening air had become damp and penetrating. It made her throat feel
sore and she choked a little as she breathed it.
Gingerly she approached the motor to make sure. What an absurd phrase!
Why, a leap of her heart would have announced its presence, even had her
eyes been shut.
She knew its every detail, the sound the gears made changing, the feel
of the seat, the way the hood went up. And, above all, the little clock,
ticking its warning by day, regular and relentless, while at night its
bright prying eyes reminded her of all the things she wanted to forget.
"It is my conscience," she would say, "and fate and mortality. It
symbolises all the limitations of life. It is the frontier to
happiness, the defeat of peace."
"Go on," he had said, "and you will end by forgetting it."